


i'm bleeding (i'm not just making conversation)

by backofthefront



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Emotional Constipation, M/M, Pining, Resentment, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-07
Updated: 2017-07-07
Packaged: 2018-11-28 20:21:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11425473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/backofthefront/pseuds/backofthefront
Summary: there's only one thing i want, don't make me say it, just get me bandages.(Kent Parson works through some things.)





	i'm bleeding (i'm not just making conversation)

**Author's Note:**

> I had meant to get this up for Kent's birthday on the 4th, but I was on vacation. So here it is now. Will shortly be a series, I think, but this stands alone fine. 
> 
> Title and summary are from Wishbone by Richard Siken, from the collection “Crush.” I highly recommend his work, at least this particular poem (which will give a vibe from this story and Kent/Jack at their angstiest, in addition to being one of my favorite poems of all time).

 

 

Kent Parson cries a lot.

He’s always been sensitive. He lets tears leak out of his eyes until he feels empty, drained, hollow. He knows he is a pretty crier. He doesn’t get the red eyes or the puffiness or the dripping nose. His eyes gather tears like diamonds.

Jack told him this once, when they were sixteen and the pressures of the world were still on the brink of their future but before they had mouthfuls of pills and liquor and barbed-wire words. Kent had been crying, he doesn’t remember what about, but he can still feel the sting of Jack’s thumb as it traced over his puffy, reddened lower lip, can still hear the husky whispered compliment.

The world was never careful with Kent Parson.

He didn’t pretend to understand. He knew he couldn’t. It was some mental shit with Jack, and it wasn’t his fault, except when it was, and poking around in the wound with a sharp metal instrument of psychoanalysis wouldn’t do either of them any good anymore. Not that people hadn’t tried to understand why Jack did what he did- doctors, parents, hell, even some of the more forward people who called themselves friends. And don’t get Kent started on the media sharks.

But they all asked Jack why. What had he been thinking, can he retrace his steps leading up to the event, were you under a lot of stress, why didn’t you tell us something was wrong, how could you throw away your future like this.

Nobody ever asked Kent what it was like to be the emergency contact in someone’s phone when they’re at the hospital having their stomach pumped after swallowing a handful of anxiety medications.

What it’s like to drive through the night just to see if someone’s still alive. What it’s like to google symptoms of depression on his phone and learning more in the moments he’s staring into himself, waiting for the page to load on the hospital’s shitty wifi, than when it actually does. To be drafted the next day, to lay the tips of your fingers on everything you’ve ever wanted, and stare out into a sea of furrowed brows and hollow voices and know he was still playing second-fiddle to Jack Zimmerman, that Jack Zimmerman was who they all expected to be up on that stage, who should be up on that stage. Jack was all anyone could think about, for Kent most of all. It was supposed to be the best night of his life. Their lives.

He’s glad nobody ever asks. He didn’t know if he could take it.

 

**THE HOSPITAL.**

Kent wasn’t the one to find Jack, and he doesn’t know if that makes it worse. His therapist, years later, tells him it’s a lack of closure.

He wonders if the bottle was sitting upright on the counter or if the pills were scattered all over the floor, like in the movies. He wonders if Jack was thinking of hockey. Of his father. Of Kent- he has to shut down that train of thought.

The waiting area of the hospital has terrible coffee. He takes it black, even though Jack has always teased him for his usually exorbitant amounts of cream and sugar. It slides like slick hot oil down his trachea. The bleach-corridor smell of the hospital feels like drowning.

They don’t let Kent see Jack for hours. He thinks vaguely that his phone must have died at some point, but he didn’t notice. The minutes weighed heavy on his chest, but nothing seemed to penetrate the emotional haze. By the hour mark he was staring a hole into nothing, crushing the Styrofoam cup he’d emptied in his hands, tearing it into little shreds until there was nothing there. There was nothing there.

 Jack doesn’t look as weak as Kent expects. He is sitting up, an IV in his arm, a nature documentary on the TV. His eyes are intent, and they narrow when Kent is led into the room by a nurse. She disappears before he can thank her.

Jack crumples in on himself when Kent walks in, hesitating near the doorway. There’s something vindicating about that. Jack couldn’t take himself out. Jack was six feet and stronger, physically, than Kent, and a hockey prodigy, and bilingual, and a genius. His biggest weakness, as much as he’d like to believe it was himself, was the egotistical blond bastard who had played second fiddle to Jack his whole damn life.

“Hi, Jacky,” he says, soft as anything he’s ever spoken.

There is so much they don’t say. It’s all pleasantries, really, a faint pulse in Kent’s veins and a hum in his ear. What’s memorable are Jack’s eyes. Always the eyes. (They’ve ruined him for any other shade of blue.)

 A nurse comes in, eventually, to usher Kent out, saying something about it being time to sleep off some medication- they’re fixing the meds with more meds, and Kent laughs, bitterly, alone in his car when he thinks of that on the way home. (He can’t judge the doctor’s methods, though- he knows he is the same way. It’s why he keeps pulling the Polaroid of him and Jack out of his wallet, taken after their first game together. They are both sweaty, eyes screwed shut in laughter and arms slung around each other. He runs his finger over picture-Jack’s face, like it will tell him where they went all wrong.)

“Bye, Kent,” Jack says, like it means nothing. Or, more accurately, like it doesn’t mean absolutely everything. That hits Kent in the chest like a knife between the third and fourth ribs. It’s always been Kenny with him. They’re on a no-nickname basis now; it dawns on him. The hospital suddenly feels less cold, removed, clinical than the words Jack’s laying on him right now.

He’d like to say he doesn’t look back when he leaves the hospital room. (He’d be lying.)

 

**REHAB.**

They say it will give him closure.

The rehab clinic smells decidedly different from the hospital, Kent thinks. Less like bleach and impending death, more like lemon furniture cleaner and tears. They have better coffee, too. Kent adds sugar this time. (They don’t have cream.)

Jack had texted him- it was and never had been worthy of a call, Kent seethed- taking him up on a tentative, between-the-lines invitation. Just checking up. Just a visit. A quick conversation.

Kent has a suspicion Jack’s father put him up to this. Knows in the back of his mind that Jack would just as soon never see him again, like all the times he’d climbed inside Kent’s body meant nothing. Like Kent wasn’t being eaten alive with the distance. Like they hadn’t been unstoppable.

This realization, or the situation itself- Kent isn’t sure which is quicker to send his core to rotting.

You could come up sometime, Jack had said. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, they’d said, like Kent wouldn’t hop an international red-eye flight just to see if Jack was breathing, like he wouldn’t cut out his own heart and serve it on a silver platter with black pepper is that’s what Jack had wanted. If he asked him to.

It feels like a carrot stick in front of his face. All the pretending. A toothy white smile and the acknowledgement that yeah, my friend, he’s ok- like that was all they ever were. Like Kent wanted anything more than to press his face into Jack’s neck and feel the pulse in his throat.

He can’t remember saying anything important in his life. It was only ever small talk, wasn’t it, Jack, he wanted to scream. Communication had never come as easily as a hockey stick. All those empty words.

The TV changes over from a documentary to Ancient Aliens. Kent is running out of fake words to say before he’s going to have to resort to the truth. (And that just worked stellar for them, hadn’t it? No, he’d better leave before he could pour out a wave of white-hot lava.)

 “Thanks for coming, Kenny,” Jack says.

Kent just nods, face expressionless.

“You always had my back. Even if, well,” Jack croaks with a wave of his hand. He doesn’t say I’m sorry I never had yours, but the meaning is there.

Kent smiles sadly. “See you sometime,” instead of “you hurt me too.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Sure.” Instead of I’m sorry. Why did you have to leave me. We’ve always been fucked up. I love you.

Jack doesn’t say anything. He’s done talking, Kent knows. This has always been a one-way conversation.

“I guess this is bye for now.” I love you. I will always love you. I wish I could stop. I’m sorry I can’t.  

It’s closure like rudimentary stitches to an open wound. Like a bruise, still tender, but yellowing. Like dirt on a shallow grave.

He asks to be taken off Jack’s approved caller list.

 

**EPIKEGSTER.**

Kent falls back into him like a relapse.

“I missed you, Jack,” he says for the second time, like this time it will stick. Like this time it will get across all the words he could not say.

“You always say that,” said Jack. And it was true; Kent always said he missed Jack. It wasn’t a lie- he did miss him. He had been missing him since they were seventeen and the world came crashing down onto Jack’s shoulders and he started popping little blue pills. Kent had missed Jack when he’d been sitting right beside him, when Jack was tangled in sheets and inside him in the closest way but had his eyes screwed shut.

Kent had always come back for more.

“I just wanted to see you.”

It doesn’t matter what Kent said, even though every syllable is like a scorch mark on his mind. What he can see, put the memory on mute, even as it’s happening, laser-focusing like on the ice- is Jack’s face, the furrowed brow, the lips (god, he knows the feel of those lips, everywhere, on his own, on his heart with words that drip poison-) pressed into a thin red line.

“We weren’t right for each other,” Jack says. His voice rings like a hollow platitude after a game lost and badly played. “We wanted different things.”

Kent felt his veins turn to ice. He couldn’t help the smile that peeled over his face, just on the wrong side of a grimace and not quite reaching his eyes. “Yeah. You wanted to be in the NHL. I wanted you to say you loved me back.”

They have never been all that different. Kent, too, knows something about addiction.

 

**LAS VEGAS.**

There are boxes in Kent’s mind, one labelled Zimmerman. It is the biggest, aside from the one labelled hockey, but it is the one he never opens.

It hurts like a check that breaks his ribs. Like a car accident. Like losing a limb. Like love.

About four months after crumbling to a hiatus with his therapist- really, how many times can you tear apart the carcass of a dead horse- Kent wakes up and doesn’t feel the ache of lacking a hard press of muscle against his own. It is the first morning that he wakes up and pokes the bruise and doesn’t want Jack Zimmerman.

He thinks it has something to do with the six foot and some inches of sculpted Russian muscle pressing against his side- shirtless, both of them, and vaguely sweaty.

Alexei Mashkov isn’t the first person Kent had slept with since Zimms (not by a long shot, actually), but he was the first that stirred feelings in places besides Kent’s groin, and, well.

It’s like water during a hangover.

Kent drinks it in, drowns himself, lets the cool liquid flow through his veins as he considers the best way to disentangle himself from the sturdy limbs he’s encased in.

He hadn’t been drunk when he took Mashkov to bed. Not last night, and not the first time, after an unusually gritty preseason game in Providence that ended in blood boiling, temperatures running hot, and, well. They had shared the ferocity of the moment, a need to kiss with teeth, bite, grab, claim a victory in something, take back something as their own. (The Aces had lost, but Kent wonders who won.)

It had evolved, an always unspoken song and dance around the fragile pulsing thing blooming between them.

His emotions were still fledgling creatures, without their wings as of yet. It had been a few months of hooking up during roadies, drunken midnight sexting. He hadn’t felt another body since the first night with Mashkov. He doesn’t know if that goes both ways (and he tries not to ruminate on it).

Another Zimmerman would kill him.

This cannot be that. He inhales, so hard it pains his chest. At least, he’ll blame that sudden stabbing on mere oxygen- easier than considering the root cause.

Alexei stirs next to him, moving his arm lower with a sleepy groan. Kent steadies his breathing and reminds himself he’s not sixteen anymore.

With all the grace he can muster off the ice, in the morning, and before coffee, he slides off the bed and plops to the floor, sending up a quick prayer of thanks for his lush shag carpeting. (Alexei’s apartment had hardwood in the bedrooms, and most hotels had that shitty not-quite carpet that was neither soft nor easy to clean.)

He had just finished dumping enough sugar into his coffee to give his nutritionist a heart attack when Alexei came into the kitchen. Kent lets his eyes drop to the cut of his abs, and down to where his grey sweats were slung low on his hips.

“You are having good morning?” Alexei asks, and Kent can tell he’s inquisitive- Kent isn’t usually up this early, much less coherent and even partially clothed. (He had never been a morning person.)

Kent jerked one shoulder in a shrug, handing Alexei a to-go mug of coffee. Alexei took it with an amused smile, taking a long swig despite the fact it was still piping hot.

“Travel cup your way of telling me going?” he laughed, unoffended. Kent smiled.

“No, but I know you have to.” The melancholy seeping into Kent’s words belied the smile on his face.

Alexei didn’t look any happier. “Team ask questions if not come to this lunch. They are thinking I am hiding girl, bad habit.” His eyes crinkle up when he smiles around another mouthful of coffee.

“What happens in Vegas,” Kent remarks somewhat absentmindedly. It’s an afterthought whether or not Alexei would even know the phrase.

He did. “No, not staying in Vegas,” he huffs, cupping Kent’s cheek and running a calloused thumb over his jawline. “This is staying wherever you are,” he says, quieter, and leans in for a kiss.

It’s more teeth than anything, pulling insistently at Kent’s lower lip. Kent doesn’t fight it. It’s nice, for a moment, to feel wanted. To feel so tempting that someone could bite into you, rip the proverbial flesh off your bones, to be eaten alive with desire.

Kent touches a finger to his lip. Shit, he thinks. He stands there, bleeding.

Dazed, somewhere behind him he hears the bedroom door click. There’s a longing, something like ennui in his bones, and he goes to get a glass of water. At least with a hangover, he knows what he’s feeling.

It’s a few more minutes before Alexei reemerges, clothes on and bedhead slicked down with water. There are no parting words to the next kiss, much more chaste, on the corner of Kent’s mouth. A goodbye for now gesture.

“Seeing you, Kotenok,” Alexei says as he shuts the door to the apartment.

Kent wonders what that pet name means. (He’s afraid of the answer, then he’s afraid of the fact that he’s afraid. Wasn’t it a vicious fucking cycle.)

It’s another thirty or so seconds of staring into space, blanking out, before Kent realizes Alexei had left the cup on the counter. He lifts it, sloshes the liquid inside around. Half-full.

Kent shrugs, pops off the lid, and pours it down the sink.

 

**Author's Note:**

> 'kotenok' is the english pronunciation of 'kitten' in russian. i will die on the hill of the pet-name headcanon. 
> 
> I headcanon that jack's prescrip was xanax (blue, similar side effects).


End file.
